Thoughts on Perl and Emacs, technology and writing

Faking Image Based Programming in Perl

One thing I like about developing the emacs environment (i.e. writing emacs lisp) is programming in the image. In contrast when I run a perl script, any data loaded into the script vanishes when the script exits.

I’m only storing part of the hashref, $image->{'store'} in this example. This is fairly typical of my standard use case for this technique – quick one off reports. Some of the data is slow to load in from the database so I persist it to disk. The rest is calculated based on the loaded data so I don’t persist it. I keep all of the data together so I can pass it to each subroutine as a single parameter.

Of course, I wouldn’t recommend this technique for a production system.